Storage subsystems typically group storage drives with similar performance characteristics together into redundancy groups. Hard disk drives (non-volatile storage devices which store digitally encoded data on rotating platters with magnetic surfaces) include performance characteristics that are closely tied to rotational speed. For purposes of categorizing hard disk drives by performance in storage drive arrays, rotational speed may be utilized. Unlike hard disk drives, solid state drives (data storage devices that utilize solid-state memory to store persistent data) have no rotational speed and there is no standard mechanism to query a solid state drive to determine its performance characteristics. The variance in the performance characteristics of solid state drives is much larger than the variation among the performance characteristics of hard disk drives. For example, the write performance at a 4 kilobyte block size may vary from 15 IOs (input/output operations) per second to 18,000 IOs per second. Additionally, serial ATA (advanced technology attachment) (SATA) hard drives have no means of reporting rotational speed via the SATA interface.